After a failed deployment of VCF 5.0, i was left with a vSAN Datastore on the first host in the cluster, and this was blocking a retry of the deployment.

In this state the vsanDatastore is unable to be deleted. If I try to delete it, the option is greyed out.

To delete the datastore and the partitions of the disks, we first need to SSH into the host and get the cluster.

We need the Sub-Cluster Master UUID, copy it to the clipboard. To leave the cluster the command is:

esxcli vsan cluster leave -u <Sub-Cluster Master UUID>

The ESXi UI now shows that the datastore is gone.

Let’s check the cli, if there still is a vSAN cluster or storage:

esxcli vsan cluster list

esxcli vsan storage list

No vSAN clusters or storage is configured on the host, after this the retry was successfully and the VCF management cluster was deployed.